looking back

Faustus Socinus defined early Unitarianism

Four centuries ago in Siena, the Italians would have burned Faustus Socinus
at the stake. But now that his call for reason in religion no longer sounds
as threatening as it did, his native city has named a street after him.
Time has also mellowed ancient animosities over other beliefs that for
more than two centuries were known as Socinianism: optimism about the
capacities of human nature, emphasis on a moral life rather than correct
beliefs, the claim that human beings have freedom of the will enabling
them to live such a life, and disbelief in post-mortem punishments in
hell. If this sounds familiar, it should: Socinianism later came
to be known as Unitarianism.

Socinus (Fausto Sozzini in Italian) was born in 1539 into a prominent
family in Siena, where the atmosphere of Renaissance humanism encouraged
free inquiry. Three years later, the Inquisition began to make Italy unsafe
for those who questioned Roman Catholic dogma, and his uncle Laelius—who
had first broken with Catholicism before raising questions about Protestant
orthodoxy in letters to John Calvin and others—went into exile. When Laelius
died, young Faustus inherited his uncle's heretical writings, then went
into exile himself in 1574. He went first to Switzerland; then to Transylvania,
where a Unitarian, John Sigismund, had been king from 1540 to 1571; and
finally to Poland, where he lived until his death in 1604.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was at that time the largest and most
tolerant country in Europe, often called the “heretics' asylum.” In its
capital city of Kraków, Socinus found a large Italian colony as
well as a congregation of nonconformists. They were part of a movement
that had begun in 1565, the year the Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur
considers “the historical beginning of organized Unitarianism.”

Socinus rapidly became an influential figure among the proto-Unitarians, though paradoxically enough he was never a formal member: Under Anabaptist influence, they had come to require baptism by total immersion as their initiation rite, and to this Socinus would not consent. His views on this debated question, as on most others, eventually prevailed, but not until after his death. Consequently, he led the movement from the outside—so effectively that by 1596 his position was unchallenged, and during the remaining eight years of his life he set his stamp upon its thinking.

Even in the tolerant atmosphere of Poland his unorthodox beliefs made
him a marked man. In 1598, while he was sick in bed, a mob of drunken
students invaded his apartment, dragged him out, made a bonfire of his
books and papers and threatened to do the same to him if he would not
recant his heresies. When he refused, they were on their way to throw
him into the river when he was rescued by professors from the Catholic
faculty of theology, whose humanitarian concerns outweighed any religious
prejudices. After this episode, Socinus left the city and was a guest
on the remote estate of a friend until his death in 1604. There, in 1933,
largely through the efforts of the historian Wilbur, a monument to his
memory was raised by Unitarians from the English-speaking world.

Still, modern Unitarian Universalists would find some of Socinus's beliefs strange. He lived only a generation or two removed from medievalism, and he shared its belief in the absolute authority of the Bible. It was his interpretation of what he found in the Bible that made him a heretic—no Trinity, no original sin, no Atonement through the death of Jesus. Such ideas are still anathema to most Christians, even though the movement he pioneered has evolved much further since his time.